Team A: Non-Use of Smartphones
-> Which impact does the non-use of smartphones have for the private and working life? Why do people decide against using smartphones?

Team B: Meaning of Cellphones for Refugees
-> What is the meaning of cellphones for refugees in Austria?

Team C: Crowd-sourcing & Labor
-> How are subjective meanings of “team work” shaped by the inter-dependencies between freelancers and the website Capacitor?

Team D: Sharing of Visual Media, Art & Cultural Identity
-> In what aspects have the Japanese art forms of dance and painting changed through the sharing of visual media/material?

Team E: Access to Internet & Power Relations within the Family Home
-> What are the effects of internet usage on children and young adults in respect to power relations in the family home?

Team F: Conversion/Discussion about Digital Content
-> What is the difference between usage of commentary sections of Serbian and German online newspapers?

Team G: Self-Identification through Visual Communication & Social Media
-> How do people identify/define themselves through visual communication via social media (websites (blogs), video blogs and Instagram)?

Team H: Ayahuasceros – Making of Ritual Community on Facebook
-> What is the relevance of Facebook in the community building process of Austrian Ayahuasca ceremonies?

Team I: Bicycle Movement & Digital Media in Vienna
-> How are digital media technologies utilized in relation to the social network BikeKitchen?

Clustering of individual ideas to create joint research projects in the seminar “Media and Visual Technologies as Material Culture” at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna.

This course gives an overview about material culture as conceptual approach to understand media and visual technologies. It focuses on digital media technologies, their visual aspects and how they are integrated and practiced in everyday life.

Internet technologies and the World Wide Web promised a lot of things: from instantaneous global communication and fast information gathering to new forms of politics, economy, organizations, and socialities, including a renewed sense of community. By studying these online and “virtual” communities, internet researchers initially focused on their structure and development (e.g. Jones 1995, Smith & Kollock, 1999). Social network theory then changed decisively the way communities on the web have been conceptualized and analyzed. Scholars like Barry Wellman (et al., 2002) and Manuel Castells (2000), argue that in the internet age societies, communities, and individuals all have a network character. Thus the conceptualization of community as social network, by focusing on the interactions in these communities, has become widespread in internet studies.

Community and social network as concepts of sociality have been critically reviewed by anthropologists particularly in the context and process of ethnographic fieldwork. Vered Amit (2002), e.g., states that community is, because of its emotional significance and popularity in public discourses, a rather poor analytical concept. Internet ethnographers hence have been starting to look for alternative ways of understanding online socialities by moving beyond the community/network paradigm (Postill 2008).

In this paper we are critically discussing the potential of alternative concepts of sociality to analyze how people are interacting on the web. In so doing, we are firstly reviewing the quite popular concept of “communitas” developed by Victor Turner to differentiate between society as social structure and society as communitas constituted by concrete idiosyncratic individuals and their interactions. In the context of the sociocultural web, the liminal experience of people switching between these two stages is particularly interesting. Secondly, we are introducing the concept of “conviviality”, coined by Joanna Overing, to internet studies. Conviviality accentuates the affective side of sociality, such as joy, creativity, and the virtues of sharing and generosity, as opposed to the structure or functioning of society. These analytical concepts and tools, derived from anthropological and ethnographic research, are finally applied to an empirical case study of Bollywood fan communities on the web and their sociocultural practices.

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This is Philipp Budka, a social and cultural anthropologist from Vienna, blogging about the anthropology of media and technology, digital anthropology & ethnography, indigenous media as well as his ethnographic fieldwork and teaching experiences.